A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app.
The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty Images, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the action, which you can read all about below.
Zite bills itself as a “personalized iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it.”
Not smart enough, it seems, to avoid copyright complaints from the content creators the app sucks in.
“The Zite application is p.. show all text

Nearly a year after Facebook Like buttons spread out across the web, Google has announced its own rival, the +1 button. It launches today as part of Google’s search engine, allowing you to “+1″ the search results and ads that you like. And in a few months, it’ll be arriving… Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Cloud computing giant Salesforce.com has acquired social media monitoring company Radian6 for approximately $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock, net of cash. In addition, approximately $10 million in stock and $4 million in cash will be issued to Radian6′s founders (subject to vesting conditions over two years).
Radian6 helps clients like Dell, GE, Kodak and UPS monitor, analyze and engage in ‘hundreds of millions’ of social media conversations. Salesforce argues tha.. show all text

I'm a very lucky guy. Over the past twelve years, I've had the good fortune to work on two huge projects that happened to be the right idea at the right time. These ideas attracted brilliant, idealistic people to do the incredibly hard work of making them work for millions of other people across the globe. And through each, I learned a tremendous amount about business, products, and people. I spent about five and a half years of my professional life on Blogger. Though not a headline-grabber t.. show all text

Making Twitter more useful for the average person — that’s Jack Dorsey’s first challenge as he returns to the company he founded, he said Tuesday. “We have a lot of mainstream awareness, but mainstream relevancy is still a challenge,” he said during a discussion at Columbia University’s Journalism School Tuesday. Mr. Dorsey, who came up with the idea for Twitter, said Monday that he is returning to be product chief of the company; on Tuesday he outlined more.. show all text

Over the past several months, we’ve released major updates to our four most popular versions: Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Android. Today, we’re excited to unveil the fifth newly redesigned member of the Evernote family, Evernote Web.
All of our recent redesigns have had several key ideas in common:
Improving the user experience
Optimizing performance
Getting the most out of each platform’s native capabilities
Incorporating as much user feedback as possible
Each one of these core.. show all text

As you may have read by now, earlier tonight, Amazon dropped a bomb on their rivals in the online music space: a fully working cloud storage and playback system. And it’s not just working on desktop web browsers, it works on Android devices too. One important place it doesn’t work though: iPhones, iPads, iPod touches — no iOS devices.
At first, you might think this is a Flash issue (Apple’s devices famously do not support Flash). But it’s not. I don’t have Fl.. show all text

The story of SimpleGeo is a familiar one: two founders — Matt Galligan and Joe Stump — set off to create location-based games, only to find that the tools they wanted to use to build their apps didn’t exist yet. So they switched gears and decided to build what they wished they had: a suite of tools optimized for the creation of location-based services (which was probably a good call given the explosion of location-aware mobile devices).
The startup launched almost exactly.. show all text

by Jean-Louis Gassée
Once upon a time, the Blackberry was the king of smartphones. After a succession of Psion PDAs and Palm devices, I loved my Blackberry, it was the perfect PIM (Personal Information Manager). Email, contacts and calendar functions worked well together — and Exchange integration was the killer Enterprise feature. It even made phone calls! On Verizon, that is. Year after year, RIM kept improving its product and expanding its worldwide distribution. The Blackberry .. show all text

At CTIA Wireless earlier this week, Samsung announced a new 10.1″ Galaxy Tab tablet–one with specs that made it thinner and lighter than the iPad 2, with the same starting price of $499. After the press event, I scurried over to the Samsung booth in hopes of getting some hands-on time with the new Tab.
When I got there, I found that the 10.1″ Tabs out on tables were the older, relatively portly version announced last month at Mobile World Congress. The new 10.1-incher (and its.. show all text

Color, the dynamic photo-sharing app that made a splash with its launch yesterday, is already hard at work on the next version of its app. The update will directly address user criticism about the app’s apparent lack of utility when a user’s friends aren’t nearby.
The app, available for iPhone and Android, allows anybody to share their photos or videos with friends and strangers. The app detects who is nearby and automatically creates groups for sharing visual content. There i.. show all text

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“Find someone. Take pictures together. Party. Play date. Lunch?” — Color Labs copy
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s official, we’re in a bubble.” — Jacques Mattheij
If you’re like most people in the tight-knit incestuous family we like to call the tech industry, all of the headlines in this Techmeme cluster on social photo-sharing app Color nabbing $41 million are actually declaring one thing, “Tec.. show all text

$41 million. From Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank. Pre-launch.
That’s how much a brand new startup called Color has to work with. Your eyebrows should already be raised, and here’s something to keep them fixed there: this is the most money Sequoia has ever invested in a pre-launch startup. Or, as the Color team put it, “That’s more than they gave Google.”
But the founding team goes a long way toward explaining it. Headed by Bill Nguyen &mdash.. show all text

Last week I gave a talk at South by Southwest, and in it I shared my top ten rules for entrepreneurship. They are borne from my experiences starting companies and partnering with great entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley as an angel and a venture capitalist. I hope they prove to be useful to you. If you are an entrepreneur and have other rules you live by and want to share with others, please post your thoughts in the comments field.
Rule #1: Look for disruptive change. If you’re about to sta.. show all text

Sources close to Groupon, the social buying site, said its president and COO, former Yahoo exec Rob Solomon (pictured here), is stepping down from his job.
It’s not clear what the reasons for Solomon’s departure are, but the move seems to be sudden. It is also unusual given the fast-track trajectory of Groupon, which is currently considering an IPO at gigantic badillion-dollar valuations.
Nonetheless, CEO Andrew Mason just sent out a short email to staff about the move. BoomTown had.. show all text

Earlier today, it was revealed that Microsoft was suing yet another company for infringing on their patents. The target this time? Barnes & Noble. Yes, Microsoft is suing a book chain. Why? Because they claim the Nook e-reader (with runs Google’s Android OS) copies status bars from Windows CE. Or something. If you’ll excuse my bluntness, it’s all a bunch of bullshit.
Devin has a good overview on CrunchGear of what the patents in question actually are. The whole thing is la.. show all text

Twitter’s official iPhone app, formerly Loren Brichter’s Tweetie and an otherwise awesome client, got a lot of negative reactions from the recent addition of the Quick Bar, a mandatory trending-topics banner on top of the tweet list. A lot of people really hate it, calling it the “dickbar” and often abandoning the Twitter app entirely because of it.
Its initial implementation as a floating overlay over anything you were doing in the app was far worse. Now, it’s jus.. show all text

The lull of my lazy, rainy weekend was broken by the news that AT&T plans to acquire T-Mobile USA for a whopping $39 billion in cash and stock. Who wins and who loses in this deal? It’s hard to find winners, apart from AT&T and T-Mobile shareholders. Here is a list of who loses, in my opinion, in this deal:
Consumers. The biggest losers of this deal are going to be the consumers. While AT&T and T-Mobile are going to try to spin it as a good deal to combine wireless s.. show all text

Startups in Silicon Valley are like old generals. They don’t die anymore, buoyed on life-rafts of lingering venture capital and modest revenues. They just fade away, eventually purchased for assets that are a shadow of their former promise. It’s pretty clear that Digg is on that path. The company isn’t dead, but it’s been fading away for a while, and its soul is all but gone. The company can spin it however it wants– the final nail in the coffin is news that founde.. show all text

Wow, when I wrote last night that Kevin Rose doesn’t really use Digg anymore, I had no idea how perfect the timing was. It turns out Rose really has tuned out. Because, say multiple sources, he’s already resigned from the company and is closing a $1+ million financing round for a new startup he’s founded.
Rose first launched Digg in December 2004. The service was an instant hit, and for a long while just all the big players thought about acquiring the company. Things never got.. show all text

The AP Stylebook, the de facto style and usage guide for much of the news media, announced on Friday that the abbreviated term for “electronic mail” is losing a hyphen, and with it, a relic of a simpler time when Internet technology needed to be explained very carefully.
The move follows the AP Stylebook’s decision to change “Web site” to “website” last year, at which time we wrote, “[We] hold our collective breath for other possible updates, such.. show all text

How bad are things at the once-mighty Digg these days? Not so good. It’s been months since Digg relaunched in August in a quest for relevance. They had 18 million unique worldwide visitors that month according to Comscore. That dropped to just under 12 million in January, a 33% drop in just five months.
Everything official coming out of Digg says things are great and that a the company will find a way to success. But everyone knows how unlikely that is. Even, it seems, founder Kevin Rose… show all text

Yahoo is about to close a deal to sell bookmarking site Delicious for $1-$2 million, says a source familiar with the discussions.
Our source isn't sure what company is buying it, but says it's a "strategic partner," something like StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon just raised a fresh $17 million round, so it could easily afford Delicious. We called StumbleUpon for comment and haven't heard back.
Yahoo's plan to get rid of Delicious leaked in December. The reason the sale is taking so long.. show all text

Under the plan, which begins on March 28, visitors to NYTimes.com will be able to read 20 articles a month free. The most frequent users will pay $15 a month; print subscribers will have unlimited access.

Today, we’re taking an important step to make it easier to manage the security of your Twitter experience – we are adding a user setting that lets you always use HTTPS when accessing Twitter.com. Using HTTPS for your favorite Internet services is particularly important when using them over unsecured WiFi connections. For some time, users have been able to use Twitter via HTTPS by going to https://twitter.com. We’ve made it simpler for users to do this by adding the option to .. show all text

Oliver Burkeman went to Texas to the South by Southwest festival of film, music and technology, in search of the next big idea. After three days he found it: the boundary between 'real life' and 'online' has disappeared
If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was over – they won't, of course, because they'll be too busy playing with the teleportation console – I'll be able to be quite specific: I was in a Mexican restaurant opposite a cemet.. show all text

Hacker with iPhone take over Times Square screens Sunday, March 13, 2011 "The way it works is pretty simple: plug in my transmitter into the headphone minijack of an iphone 4 and play back any… [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Experts in Japan and the United States said that the releases from nuclear plants could go on for weeks or months. Officials are also reporting a new explosion.

AT&T Implements Broadband Caps: Broadband News and Analysis « – AT&T is planning to send out letters next week to notify subscribers about a coming broadband cap of 150 GB per month for DSL subscribers and 250 GB per month for U-verse subscribers says company spokesman Seth Bloom in an interview at SXSW.

We believe that Google will preview a major new social service called Google Circles at South by Southwest Interactive today. Update: Google has now officially denied that Circles will launch here, but not that it exists. Others, including Tim O'Reilly, have also now confirmed that they've seen it and that it's awesome. If what we've heard is correct, the service will offer photo, video and status message sharing. Everything users share on Circles will be shared only with the most appropriate c.. show all text